A conference call is a telephone call in which three or more parties, each at a respective location, participate. The most common technique used to initiate a conference call involves the originating party separately dialing each terminating party participating in the conference call. Each time one of the terminating parties answers, the originating party bridges the answering party into the conference call. One drawback to this technique is that the originating party will be fully occupied with the tasks of calling each terminating party and bridging the answering parties into the conference call. As a result, therefore, the originating party is preoccupied with set-up of the conference call and rarely participates in the conference call itself until set-up is complete. Since the originating party is usually the key participant, the first portion of the conference call is, therefore, usually a very inefficient use of resources.
Another technique for establishing a conference call involves providing a "dial-in" telephone number used to join the participants at a common bridge. As each participant dials into the bridge, the requirement that one of the participants individually dial each one of the other participants has been eliminated. However, this technique requires that the conference call be prearranged well in advance so that use of the service may be reserved and each of the participants will know when to dial in. Accordingly, this technique is unsuitable for conference calls which need to be conducted with little, if any, advance notice.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,631,904 to Fitser et al. discloses a method for automatically establishing a conference call in which a subscriber creates one or more calling groups for storage at a network teleconferencing system. To establish a conference call between the members of a selected one of the pre-existing calling groups, a caller dials into the network teleconferencing system. After identifying the caller as an authorized subscriber to the system, the teleconferencing system asks the subscriber to specify a group identifier associated with a pre-existing calling group. If the group identifier matches one of the pre-existing calling groups, the teleconferencing system will originate calls to each of the destinations specified in the calling group and bridge the subscriber and each member of the pre-existing calling group into a conference call. While Fitser et al. is intended as a remedy to problems commonly associated with existing techniques for originating conference calls, Fitser et al. appears to create as many problems as it seeks to solve. Telephone users are often adverse to using remotely located databases. Not only is it very time consuming for a user to set-up the requisite database, successfully navigating through such a database is oftentimes a difficult, if not impossible, task. If the various calling groups are not clearly distinguished from each other during set-up of the database, the user may accidentally select the wrong calling group when arranging a conference call. Finally, an inordinate amount of time may be spent modifying the various calling groups stored in the database. For example, temporarily substituting an assistant for a vacationing employee would necessitate two separate modifications, one at departure and a second upon return of the vacationing employee, to each calling group for which the vacationing employee is a member.